Why did Logicworks decide to work with Amazon early on, rather than try to compete?

It's one of these things where we look back and say, “We got that one right,” and I'm really glad we did. We are in a fairly privileged position today because we started on this so much earlier when our peer group was looking at Amazon as a company to compete with.

It really started with balance sheet analysis. It started by us asking; “Can we do the same thing for our clients on someone else's gear than we do carrying all this capex and equipment?” Amazon was going to invest in its infrastructure and scale it out so we wouldn't have to. In our private cloud hosting business, we used to buy all that stuff and depreciate the assets in our colocation facilities. As we started to look under the hood … we realized that not only could we keep doing what we were doing, but we (could) do something an order of magnitude more sophisticated and elegant for our clients. When we started to approach the business not as racking and stacking hardware, but as a platform to write code on top of so we could create responsive and customized infrastructure without human intervention, that really changed the business model.